While the bulk of my writing is academic, I sometimes write poems, plays, stories, and novels. They haven’t had quite as much luck as the academic stuff, which is why I tend to stick to that. I also would like to get tenure and maintain my academic credibility, etc, etc.

If you’re interested in reading more, please do contact me via jeffguhin @ gmail.com. I’m also looking for an agent to represent both Plead and future fiction and non-fiction works.

Here’s a brief blurb about Plead:

This novel has insidious angels, reworked Bible stories, and zealous Catholic activists. It has a heartbreaking family saga, big questions about the problem of evil, and a Tower of Babel-like organization that can manipulate a grid that undergirds the universe, which might well be a big computer program. Yet it turns out that worrying if we’re all just characters in a program is not all that different from worrying about an absent God. Plead is about four generations of a large Irish Catholic family from New York City. Their lives change completely in 1975 when one of Zach McCandless’s twelve children, Philly, is raped, reintroducing the family to the angels who forced their patriarch, Zach’s father, Abe, to emigrate from Ireland. Philly becomes a radical activist after the attack, abandoning her daughter conceived in the rape, the eerily Christ-like Izza, who the angels convinced her to keep. Peter, the oldest brother, begins a life of Catholic asceticism to overcome his guilt for the brutal way he killed Philly’s attacker, eventually fathering the novel’s narrator, Tommy. And Joey, the youngest sibling, goes to college in New Orleans, where he encounters his own supernatural abilities and becomes aware of an ancient organization of people with powers like his, racing against the angels to find a god hiding on Earth. While the novel has many themes, Plead is ultimately about one family’s efforts to do what’s best—for themselves, for their communities, and for their God—and the devastation this insistence often brings upon them.